THE FUTURE OF OVERWATCH'S STORYTELLING

Overwatch doesn’t really have a story. Not while you’re playing it, anyway, where you might murder a red-tinged mirror of yourself while escorting a talking limousine to an arbitrary point, or find your ‘good guy’ character fighting alongside an evil goth for no particular reason. It is, for all intents and purposes, utter nonsense, but it’s video game nonsense, which we forgive.

Outside of play, Overwatch has a million stories. There’s its delightfully unruly headcanon, where unlikely couples end up in bed and the space and time continuum can be be bent into any shape fans want. But there’s also its official lore, born from stunning Pixar-esque standalone shorts, that have informed the way we view these characters and their relationships, and moved us in the process.

The future of these shorts has interested me since ‘Recall’, the very first one that told a touching story about a baby gorilla being inspired by the idea of a better world. Recall certainly gave us enough Overwatch exposition to leave it there: this is the bad guy, these are the good guys, the good guys are reassembling. I ask Overwatch VFX Supervisor Jeff Chamberlain what the impetus was to keep going.

“We knew that we wanted to create a lot of stories as quickly as we could to tell as much as we could for these characters and we thought that maybe just doing one cinematic for the game release and leaving it at that wasn't quite enough,” says Chamberlain. “And so we talked about a few different options and we ultimately landed on the idea of doing a series of shorts and we really haven't looked back since.”

The first several laid the groundwork for the overall idea of Overwatch; the call to arms, old heroes shaking off the dust. The more recent shorts ‘The Last Bastion’ and ‘Infiltration’, released alongside new character Sombra, were more straightforward character profiles that existed outside the main story. Blizzard isn’t putting too many restrictions around the stories it wants to tell, explains Chamberlain. “Honestly, sometimes it's just like ‘wouldn't it be really cool to make two ninjas fighting each other’, basically.”

There is, however, still a desire to push an overarching Overwatch story forward, so it’s not simply a case of giving every character a short for the sake of it. Launching the game, the team tended to focus on exposition, says lead writer Michael Chu. “But I think that we have a desire to continue to push the story forward because you know the game sort of exists in its own pockets of time.”

But what about its storytelling model? Overwatch is a multiplayer FPS, which means it is essentially endless. Are Overwatch’s shorts modelled on comic books, with continual narrative arcs, or are they inspired by TV, which leans toward definitive endings? Chu suggests it’s the former.

“Especially when you consider all of the heroes we've announced so far and all the story that we've released, I know that just from us discussing it from a story perspective we have so many different stories that we would love to telI. I think as long as we have stories to tell, we'll keep trying to find ways to tell them.”

As you might expect, the production of these shorts is intensive. Chamberlain tells me each takes six to eight months to get from initial storyboards to final frame, and the cinematics team generally have two to three in development at the same time. Not every asset comes packaged and ready for Chamberlain’s team to use, and there’s a lot of fiddly filling in the blanks.

“The rooftops aren't built to be seen that close up,” he says, referring to the rooftop fight between Tracer and Widowmaker in ‘Alive’ which takes place on an existing Overwatch map, King’s Row. “And so often we have to see where the camera will be in the short and then decide where we need to increase the resolution of whatever is there.”

Though the games team usually leads the charge on design, sometimes it’s a joint effort. Winston’s lab in Gibraltar, for example, was built in-game and out of it at the same time. “They would put something into his lab and we would incorporate it and then we would put something in and they would re-do the level,” laughs Chamberlain. “So it was a lot of back and forth, it was pretty fun.”

Where there isn’t the bandwidth to produce a short - in a story that requires 20 characters in one shot, for example - it may become a comic, an alternative, and increasingly popular means of telling Overwatch’s story. “There have been times when we'll write a story and it actually was intended for one thing, like the Pharah comic for instance, was intended to be a short initially and then just because of a bunch of different circumstances, it became a comic.”

It may also become a 2D origin movie, which are simpler and more cost-effective, but give Overwatch’s writers a better opportunity to explore the inner workings of their characters. “Because most of them are narrated by the hero themselves,” says Chu, “it's a really good opportunity to look into the character's head and see how the character feels about themselves and different events. So we like to use those to tell origin stories because they're sort of uniquely suited to that.”

But Overwatch’s shorts are the main focus, not least because they bring its universe to life in such rich detail. Before we finish our interview, I ask Chu and Chamberlain what their favourites were.

“Barely edging out the others is probably Last Bastion,” says Chu, “and I'm really lucky that Jeff let me answer first so that I could swipe that one. It was really fun because I remember when the original idea was pitched, like everyone in the room kind of got it.”

“Like Michael said it's kind of hard to pick your favourite because I like them all for different reasons,” says Chamberlain, “but I think the one I still watch every once in awhile and it still kind of gets me is ‘Hero’.

“I just think it's really well crafted and I think it's a great example of what makes Overwatch good. Which means is it has a lot of heart, and the characters... you really grow to love them quite a bit.”

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